


What You Thought You Knew

by sarken



Category: Third Watch
Genre: Gen, Late Night Conversations in Diners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-09
Updated: 2005-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:24:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarken/pseuds/sarken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faith and Bosco go to a diner after work, and Faith makes a confession about the shootout in "More Monsters" while Bosco shares his french fries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What You Thought You Knew

**Author's Note:**

> Around this time of year, I seem to get some sort of urge to have Bosco and Faith sit down at a little diner and have a chat.

Her office is foreign to him, just like the sound of her fingernails tapping against the keyboard. Sitting in Jelly's chair reminds him that this will never be his job. The presence of fat-assed detectives from decades passed crowds the room and stretches the chair. He feels small and suffocated as he looks around, expecting to see ghosts. All he sees is Faith.

"What?" she mumbles, squinting at the computer screen. Bosco's eyes on her back always feel like he's talking just to listen to his voice.

"Trying to picture you as a fat-assed detective," he says, grinning. There's a Dunkin Donuts box on the desk behind her, open and empty.

"Already am." She reaches for her coffee only to realize it's empty.

Bosco pushes his cup across the desk and into Faith's hand. "Naw," he says, and it's the closest he's ever come to giving her a compliment. He notices things about her, like the way she stopped buttoning her shirt so high and the way she started wearing more makeup, but he knows it's not his place to say anything. She tells him so every time she flirts with a uniform who isn't him.

"So," he says, "what did you want to talk about at two in the morning?"

"Not here," Faith tells him. She clicks the print button and the printer sputters to life. They both jump -- a police station shouldn't have electronics that sound like gunfire. "We'll go get coffee at the diner."

He doesn't mention that her hand is wrapped around the full, warm cup he just passed to her.

*

Bosco orders coffee and fries when the waitress comes over. He tries to order for Faith, but she cuts him off. "Just a glass of water. Thanks."

"You should eat." He doesn't know when he turned into the parent. He also doesn't know when he started to care that she specifically said coffee but only ordered water.

Faith pushes a pink packet of artificial sweetener back and forth between her hands. "I eat enough working with Jelly."

He snatches the Sweet 'n Low as it slides from her right hand to her left. "I mean real food, not doughnuts," he says, but he knows she hasn't been eating anything. And she swore off doughnuts the moment she graduated from the Academy.

"I didn't know we were going to talk about my diet," she says, looking at him although her head is bowed.

"What're we gonna to talk about, then?" He doesn't have patience for this game, the one where they pretend to talk and then pretend they're okay. In thirteen years, they've never been okay.

Faith turns her head and looks around the empty diner. The waitress sets the fries and the water in front of Bosco; gives Faith the coffee. Faith doesn't switch their drinks. She just wraps her hands around the warmth of the speckled ceramic mug. "About the hospital. About Mann. About me, a little bit."

Bosco shrugs. Talking to Faith is like talking to a perp: both shut up when he starts looking interested.

"I was looking for an out," she says, hoping he knows what she means, and yet hoping he doesn't know, never thought about dying on purpose. "I don't freeze up, Bosco."

He takes a sip of the water that was meant for her, reaches for the ketchup.

"That was the day after Fred told me he wanted a divorce. It was two days after he moved the kids and half the apartment uptown. I don't think I was scared or confused." She watches him upend the bottle and pound its bottom with his hand. She thinks it would be easier if he were actually ignoring her. "I think I wanted to die."

"Nah," he says. He dismisses the notion without further consideration.

Faith wishes he didn't think so highly of her. She leans forward and crosses her arms on the tabletop. "You saved someone who wanted to die, Bos."

He hits the ketchup bottle harder and a glob of red spills out onto his fries. He places the bottle back on the table, his hand still wrapped loosely around it as he says evenly, "Do you want me to apologize?"

The question catches her off guard. "N-no," she stutters out, her forehead wrinkled.

"Then we're fine." He screws the lid back on and returns the ketchup to its original location. He picks up a French fry and waves it at the plate. "Want one?"

She takes one, careful to avoid those with ketchup. She can't stand having anything red near her mouth, not after it took days to wash Bosco's blood away. She started spending fifteen cents more and buying purple ketchup. She pretends it's for Charlie.

Faith doesn't realize what Bosco said until after she chases the fry with a sip of coffee. "That's it? You're not pissed at me? God, I felt so guilty that I went and--and you tell me that we're fine?"

Ketchup drips off his fry and onto the table. "Look, I don't care what you might've been thinking. The only way I'd be pissed at you is if you still wanted to be dead, and I don't even know if I'd be pissed then." He doesn't need to tell her that he would probably just be worried.

"Don't you wanna know what I did?" she asks. He doesn't believe that she could ever want to die, but she believes it. She wants him to know that she's sorry for that.

"Nope," he says. He tosses a fry into his mouth and talks around it. "'Cause then I might have to be pissed at you, and I really don't wanna have to regret jumping in front of that gun."

She tries to make it into a joke. "Now you're just gonna be pissed that I dragged you out here for nothing at two in the morning."

Bosco wrinkles his nose when he shrugs. "I was hungry anyway," he says, offering her a fry covered with ketchup.

Her stomach churns at the sight, but she smiles bravely and eats it.


End file.
